REVIEW : Body Language : In sculptures and drawings, Kiki Smith crafts the human form with fragile elegance and a smooth blend of reality and metaphor

Cadavers, sputum, blood, flesh, sweat, semen, tears, mucus--the subject of Kiki Smith’s art is the awful vessel called a human body.

At a moment when the body has become the focus of political warfare of extraordinarily divisive power, from AIDS to abortion, her work can be arresting. Sometimes she crafts allusive surrogates or metaphors, while at others she makes sculptures and drawings that faithfully describe the human anatomy and its miraculous fluids.

In the “1991 Biennial Exhibition” recently at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, Smith’s sculpture was unusually compelling. Not only did it stand out among work by more than two dozen artists not previously shown in any of the museum’s typically controversial surveys, it also held its own among sculptures by numerous others with long-established reputations.

Smith’s delicate bust made from crumpled paper, which gazed down from a high shelf like a ghostly apparition of a Giacometti bronze, and her pair of life-size nude figures, exquisitely crafted from painted beeswax,

were among the most memorable pieces in the show. Before the exhibition ended, the Whitney had acquired the pair of nudes for its permanent collection.

Although the Manhattan-based artist has been in numerous group exhibitions in Europe and the United States in the last 11 years, including shows with the prominent New York collective of the early 1980s called COLAB, Smith has shown actively in solo venues only since 1988. The selection of the 36-year-old sculptor for the “Biennial” no doubt arose from a widely noticed solo exhibition the previous year at the Museum of Modern Art, as part of its “Project” series focusing on new work by younger or lesser-known artists.

Two of the sculptures from the presentation at MOMA are now in the collection of the Lannan Foundation, where they have joined one other work by the artist in an exhibition called “Body/Language,” drawn from among the foundation’s recent acquisitions. (Sculpture and drawings by Mike Kelley and photomurals by Mitchell Syrop complete the show, which continues through Sept. 7.) Together with a sculptural installation and a suite of nine drawings currently at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica (through July 13), which includes a bust somewhat similar to the Whitney example, they provide a brief but incisive introduction to Kiki Smith’s art.

Recasting Giacometti in paper, as it were, explicitly declares a sensibility informed by traditions of modern sculpture, yet decidedly wary of them. The three sculptures at the Lannan Foundation are untitled, as is frequently the case with Smith’s work, and all employ rather anomalous materials: glass that has been cast, etched or silvered; paper-thin sheets of dusty black rubber; translucent, apparently handmade Japanese paper that has been cast and colored with ink.

Like the beeswax nudes, these substances are delicate, quietly elegant and refined. As against the traditional imperatives of sculpture, which lean toward the durable and permanent, her materials embrace the fragile and potentially transitory. Their unabashed exquisiteness invites close perusal, but their shocking fragility signals danger and mortality.

The flashiest and most aggressively seductive piece in the Lannan show is made from three thin sheets of rubber, together about six feet square, which have been laid out on the floor in the center of the room. This rubber skin is the nominal pedestal for a swarm of 230 spermatozoa, each six to eight inches long and made from hand-cast glass, which are arrayed in a circular configuration like a tightly swirling whirlpool.

The surface of each translucent, crystal sperm is softly frosted, which gently traps refracted light inside the form. Surrounded by a soft glow, this interior pin-spot of illumination is like a generative nucleus within semen. At once icy cool, white hot and vaguely wicked, Smith’s spilled seed is radiant with onanistic pleasure.

Nearby, a dozen cylindrical glass bottles, each 27 inches tall and 15 inches in diameter, are lined up shoulder-to-shoulder atop a chest-high, altar-like pedestal. Corroded with age, and silvered inside to create an impenetrably mirrored surface, each sealed bottle is etched with a single German word, written in an archaic script: Urin , Milch , Blut , Durchfall , Tranen , Eiter , and so on.

The list names fluids produced by the body--urine, milk, blood, diarrhea, tears, pus, etc.--a body that is doubly recalled by the glass bottles. Not only do their mirrored surfaces reflect the viewer’s presence, but an anthropomorphic association is inevitable for any vessel, as a quick regard for its common breakdown into neck, shoulder, body and foot makes plain.

The composition of this sculptural tableau suggests everything from conventional depictions of the Last Supper in Western art to a stylized laboratory in a horror movie. Smith’s use of German words (she was born in Nuremberg in 1954, and heard both German and English from her earliest years), coupled with the poetically ritualistic associations of the archaic script, creates all manner of pungent references for the sculpture. From the 12 plagues that rained down on Pharaoh to the stations of the cross, a subtle inflection of religious iconography is inescapable.

In a related vein, I’ve taken to thinking of Smith’s “paper Giacomettis,” which she places on shelves hung high up on the wall, as nondenominational yet nonetheless heavenly surrogates who gaze down on the follies of mere mortals below, rather like the ancient gods or rosy-cheeked cherubs hovering in the margins of Baroque altarpieces and Rococo ceilings. And having already reveled in the proscribed pleasures of onanism, you now get to play the cheery part of Judas to her 12 mirrored vessels: Reflected in the silver surface of the apostolic configuration, you are isolated on the outside trying to look in.

Coupled with the tactile sensuality of her chosen materials--the desire to touch the fragile paper skin, or to cradle a crystal sperm in your hand, is strong--an undercurrent of sexuality runs through most all of Smith’s art. Sometimes, however, as in the installation called “Tears Come” at Shoshana Wayne Gallery, it cannot carry the weight that is asked of it.

Composed from droplet shapes of delicate paper suspended from dowels, “Tears Come” is a tiered mobile paired with a weeping paper bust. The flickering union of sexuality and sorrow declared by the title is simply not carried by the whimsically airy mobile and the paper head, from which streams of paper tears coyly dangle. Bathos intrudes.

By contrast, her strongest sculpture coaxes forth complex questions of both morality and mortality--terms commonly pitted against one another for coercive effect. But she does not play a strong-arm game. Sex and flesh and death are simply givens.

Smith avoids any moralistic preaching through a deft device: Highly particularized, her sculptures nonetheless have an oddly generic feel, as if they are individualized samples from a larger class, which have been assembled for your close analysis. They have the look of specimens.

The laboratory-like bottles are an obvious example, but nowhere is this specimen-like quality more forceful than in her cadaverous body-sculptures. At the Lannan Foundation, a devastatingly beautiful, life-size paper body of what appears to be an elderly man, riddled with blue arteries and stained red with ink, has been literally torn limb from limb. Hollow and collapsed, the head and torso, the severed legs and dangling arms are push-pinned to the wall, like a dissected bullfrog to a specimen board.

The naked pair of Whitney sculptures, which seem to have been cast in wax from molds taken from an actual man and woman, rather like full-body death masks, are similarly offered up as specimens for your inspection. Each is suspended at the arm pits from a steel scaffold bolted to the floor, its dead weight viscerally conveyed.

There is nothing morbid or horrific about any of these carcasses. To the contrary, what’s shocking is their poignancy, the sheer loveliness of the puddled blood beneath the waxy skin or the way the flayed limbs describe a sinuous curve in space. As a sculptor, Smith’s most remarkable gift is her capacity to impart a pungent sense of dignity and awe to a human body that is more commonly battered in a multitude of unspeakable ways.